The Hyde Park plate. Relief from Copernicus GLO-30; rivers and lakes from USGS NHD; watersheds from the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset; roads and city limits from Census TIGER 2024.
Hyde Park’s center stands about 7,920 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 7,050 ft to 9,140 ft, a difference of 2,090 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Santa Fe Baldy, about 12,580 ft, 11 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pennsylvanian rocks, undivided (shale, limestone, mixed-clastic), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 3×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Conglomerate-sandstone, coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Late Miocene to Pleistocene, 0.1 to 7.2 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Granitic, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.7 billion years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Pelitic-schist, muscovite-schist, quartzite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Plutonic. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 2.5 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone, mixed-clastic. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Conglomerate-sandstone, coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Late Oligocene to Late Miocene, 5.3 to 28 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 1 smaller unit along the line are not listed.
Heights from Copernicus GLO-90 (a surface model: it includes buildings and tree canopy); summits from USGS GNIS; rivers from USGS NHDPlus HR; rock from the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation.
A raindrop that lands in Hyde Park reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Santa Fe and the Rio Grande: about 1,630 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Paz Ramirez Lake, Amistad Reservoir, Elephant Butte Reservoir and Caballo Reservoir.
760 miles of the trip are on the Rio Grande.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Hyde Park; river miles along the main stem, rounded.